the Top SSD
Companies - Q4 2015

The
Top SSD Companies is
invariably one of the
most popular
articles here on the mouse site. Its usefulness over a period spanning
nearly 9 years has been discussed before so I won't repeat those points here.

Diablo has been higher - but
maintaining the #2 slot (with only a 25% gap in search volume behind SanDisk)
at a time when the markets it hoped to dominate (memory channel SSDs
and cheap dense NVM as tiered DRAM
replacement) suddenly became sprayed with announcements of intent from a
scatter of potential competitors was no mean feat.3 (tied) - Pure Storage - up
7 places

This is the best ever ranking for Pure Storage in the history
of this series (which was tracking enterprise flash array market leaders for
years before Pure was founded.) I think that part of the mood leading to
this high degree of interest in Pure was curiosity as to whether the
(recently public) company's results would show that there was a new type of
flash based business miracle to be revealed by a company which didn't have its
own flash technology and had already told investors in its IPO documents that
its ratio of customers to employees was close to an unsustainable 1 on 1. 3 (tied) - Violin
Memory - up 4 places

I sometimes have to stop myself writing
the epithet "troubled" as a prefix to stories about Violin Memory.
And even though I think it and write about it - my cut and paste tool hasn't
bonded these words inseparably together yet. 5 - Micron
- down 2 places

There was a small drop from the temporary glamor of
the smoke and mirrors announcement with
Intel which had made
Micron seem so fascinating in the previous quarter. There were a lot of ideas
for investors and customers and competitors of Micron to digest. And the
computations concerning which SSD architecture inspired technology factors
would slash away past business glories and their relative size and timing
compared to emerging new markets were being scored in different ways in
different contexts. I think there are multiple personalities possible when
you analyze a company like Micron which has both memory and SSD
characteristics. I discussed these quandaries in a recent article -
an SSD
guide to semiconductor memory boom-bust cycles.6 - Seagate
- down 1 place

In this quarter Seagate completed its acquisition of
Dot Hill. When this
agreement was announced (in August 2015) I said - "As part of Seagate -
Dot Hill 's caching technology could become a viable alternative platform for
integrators who want to compete with newer vendors Tegile, Nimble, NexGen and
hybrids from older
vendors like HP and EMC." Another interpretation is that this
acquisition secures a pot of IP glue which will help cement gaps between pure
HDD and pure SSD product lines while also providing new entry points in
cloud architecture
games. It's also a step consistent with securing a starting position in
the enterprise
SSD box consolidation wars in which many of Seagate's traditional enterprise
customers may disappear or become competitors.7 - HGST
- down 3 places

HGST is Western Digital's surrogate chef in the
enterprise SSD takeout. But while HGST's SSD IP pot has already been brimming
over with past acquisitions which have been tossed into its SSD spice rack
- we can only guess that HGST's coping menus were stimulating rather
than satisfying its owners' growing SSD appetites. Hence the need for SanDisk
and a much bigger pot.8 - Intel
- up 3 places

For over 10 years Intel has been a slow moving hit and
run victim of several long term trends in the computer market which have
piecemeal and collectively weakened the value of its legacy processors and the
architectural authority of its technology roadmaps. The once unthinkable,
but inevitable consequences - if unchecked - were that Intel's own design
processors would not be enough to keep its fabs busy. In 2015 Intel made 2
significant moves to correct these problems:-

in a move calculated to fix its historic failures to dominate several
significant post PC markets (phones and tablets) due to its well known
aversion to customizing products - Intel acquired
Altera - which
provided - in a single $16 billion scoop - both a new presence in 3rd party
designed SSD controllers - but more importantly - a standard silicon platform
which provides ASIC-like flexibility which is affordable in industrial and
enterprise markets.

in a move which could leverage important aspects of SSD-CPU equivalency
within semiconductor packaging (importing ideas already proven in systems)
while at the same time re-entering the memory market in a face-saving way (which
avoids stirring the ghosts of memory markets past) Intel emerged in 2015 as
part of a new memory tiering double-act with Micron.

These changes
could potentially provide Intel different entry portals into the SSD
everywhere market - which are genuinely Intel architecture based - instead of
being (as up to now) merely me-too.9 - OCZ -
down 3 places

In this quarter OCZ announced its "Host Managed SSD
Technology" - which aligns with a new flow of
big controller
architecture thinking in recent years about how and where it's best to
optimize different types of control actions at the flash level in an SSD drive
which, however cleverly designed it may be itself, is merely seen as a
grunt in the scheme of things when sitting alongside many such others in an
applications oriented big array.10 - BiTMICRO
- up 6 places

In this quarter BiTMICRO announced that it was using
dedupe and compression software from
Permabit inside its
new 1U iSCSI AFAs.11 - Samsung
- up 3 places

In this quarter Kaminario didn't make any signficant
product announcements.13 - EMC
- down 5 places

In this quarter EMC - which had acquired so many other
storage companies in its 36 year history - itself became the object an
acquisition agreement. The buyer being
Dell. This clarified one
aspect of change in the market... No SSD company is too big to be acquired.14 - InnoDisk
- up 1 place

In this quarter InnoDisk introduced a new SSD for the
M.2 market with dual access
ports (USB and GbE)15 - Virtium
- up 5 places

In this day and age who'd have thought there would still
be demand for 2.5"
PATA SSDs? Well in the military
market there is - and in this quarter Virtium announced new models which
support upto 30 DWPD.16 - Toshiba
- up 8 places

In this quarter Toshiba and SanDisk (which benefits
from shared fab capacity) said they were increasing the clean room space at the
Yokkaichi fabs to support the transition of production from 2D to mostly 3D
nand flash. If you're curious about the internals of this factory - a video
about it - was one of the links independently suggested in the
January 2016
edition of the
SSD Bookmarks.17 - RunCore
- up 6 places

Throughout 2015 RunCore's English language website often
looked as if it had been abandoned by its parent and if you relied
exclusively on that for clues about what the company was doing in the SSD world
you would erase them from your list. I had some direct communication with the
company this year and I got the impression that customized products for a small
number of big customers in embedded markets had been their priority.
Whereas when it came to marketing communications they had been preoccupied with
trade shows, direct sales, rebranding efforts and business development in
regions like China and Europe. 18 - Nimbus
Data Systems - same as before

Nimbus was not mentioned in any
SSD related announcements in this quarter.19 - Tegile
Systems - down 6 places

If there was anything interesting that
Tegile could say about how leveraging the customer experience of AFAs and
hybrids could be leveraged by crowd-aware software and aligned with user
experience based pricing models Tegile had already said it before this quarter
began. Some commentators had suggested that the company was preparing the
ground for an IPO beauty pageant season in 2016. And confirmation came via
news reports in the quarter after these search results were captured that the
company had redirected some of its analytical capabilities inwards towards
pruning its own business development costs.20 - Marvell
- up 2 places

Marvell didn't make any SSD related announcements in
this quarter.21 - Foremay
- down 4 places

Foremay didn't make any SSD related announcements in
this quarter.22 - IBM
- up 4 places

There's rarely a week goes by without a gushing linkedin
story about IBM's flash, cloud and storage software - but little of real
substance. These are mostly permutations based on different pre-existing
products and customer stories. I think at times of great change and uncertainty
in enterprise data architecture many people instinctively look towards IBM to
see what have they got to say. Particularly regarding a 19% year on year
decline in storage revenue. But in that respect they weren't the only company
reporting similar results. Some of which are inevitably a result of greater
competitiveness and efficiencies in the market.23 - Cactus
Technologies - down 2 places

In this quarter Cactus compiled
its past SSD blog output into an educational collection called - SSD 101 -
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know - aimed at engineers in
industrial
markets.

This was a reappearance in the list for a company
which is one of a small number of
software companies
which are anticipated to change the way that we think about new SSD enabled
data architectures in the next 3 years.25 - Microsemi
- down 6 places

In this quarter Microsemi effectively beat an offer
from (RF company) Skyworks to acquire
PMC-Sierra.

It looks like you're seriously interested
in SSDs so if you've got the time - you might also want to take a look at
the home page of StorageSearch.com
which - unlike most home pages - also includes some real content.

We're now nearing a pivotal
point in the enterprise SSD market where the long held assumptions I helped to
encourage (especially how many leading systems vendors there will be in the
market at the same time) are about to change dramatically.

Attracting absolutely more reader search volume than before wasn't
enough to retain the rank of some companies in the Top SSD Companies in this
quarter (Q4 2015) because there were more readers than before interested in
all the top companies. This means that all vendors had to up their game even
to stay in the same mental place.

....

The enterprise flash
story... why is the plot so tangled?

The enterprise flash story... A lot has been
written about it. But have you ever wondered - why did the plot get so
complicated? And have you seen some of the recent episodes? Many of these
new characters just aren't believable. But the SSD startup scriptwriters keep
adding new heroes and villains and twists.

Which got me thinking.
Was there ever a best past time to simplify the whole series? And was
there ever a heroic golden age of enterprise SSD? By which I mean - when was
the most exciting episode at which to get started? ...read the
article

....

....

Decloaking hidden segments
in the enterprise

Some of the world's leading SSD
marketers have confided in me they know from their own customer
anecdotes that there are many segments for enterprise flash arrays which
aren't listed or even hinted at in standard models of the enterprise
market.

Many of these missing market segments don't even have
names.

Hey - that means SSD-world is like a map of the US before
Lewis and Clark.

"Flash based RAM
replacements (from Diablo, Netlist, OCZ, SanDisk and others) which are used as
a new memory tier will have the same effect on enterprise DRAM revenue that
SATA SSDs had on the 15K SAS hard drive market."